​A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications chronicled how a team of scientific researchers in Philadelphia have been able to successfully gestate eight-week-old lamb fetuses in artificial wombs. Quite naturally the success of this experiment has been extrapolated to human neonatology and made the prospect of human ectogenesis a distinct possibility if not an inevitable reality.

The purpose of this presentation is to critically evaluate ectogenesis from a theo-ethical perspective by way of using theological anthropology as an analytical lens. More specifically I will appropriate the Christological concept of monogenḗs in order to show why the uniqueness of Christ’s “begotteness” paradoxically illuminates and therefore instructs and informs a fundamental existential reality of what it is to be human – namely to be born. For it is in being born, that is to have a discrete recognizable embodied beginning, that connects us intimately with our radical contingency and therefore allows us to peer and indeed step deeper into the pathos of divine suffering.